Mar/Apr 1997
Portfolio
Coffee Mates
An artist and a mathematician share a “ready-made” brew
By Rhonda Roland Shearer
One of the most outrageous and seemingly incomprehensible innovations in the art of the twentieth century was the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s introduction of so-called readymades. Duchamp’s action in taking such everyday objects as a bicycle wheel on a stool (1913), a bottle dryer (1914), a snow shovel (1915-16), a hat rack (1917) and a urinal (1917), and displaying them as art, continues both to inspire present-day artists and to confound historians about the origins of Duchamp’s revolutionary idea. I have recently discovered that the source and purpose for Duchamp’s readymades can be traced quite explicitly to the writings of the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri PoincarĂ©-a finding that documents a remarkable link between science and art.
Duchamp’s inspiration comes from PoincarĂ©’s description of how creative thinking operates, in the popular essay Science and Method (1908)-where PoincarĂ© describes his accidental discovery of the so-called Fuchsian functions, as well as the universal process of discovery itself. Following days of “unfruitful” conscious work spent trying to prove the functions do not exist, PoincarĂ© changed his habit one evening and drank black coffee late at night. The next morning, and continuing over the following several days, “fruitful” ideas came into his conscious mind. All he then had to do was “select” among the “worthy combinations” of ideas. Unexpectedly, he suddenly saw a way to prove the existence of the very mathematical functions whose existence he had previously doubted.
PoincarĂ© believed that the “black coffee” had opened to his “over-excited consciousness” a window through which he “partly” perceived his “unconscious” mind at work. Most of the hard work, according to PoincarĂ©, is done by the “automatic machine motion” of the unconscious “subliminal ego.” The next step in the mechanical discovery is a required rest, during which “fruitful” ideas can be selected “readymade” (PoincarĂ©’s term)-not by anyone, or even through calculations or reason, but only by a person with great “irrational” yet “delicate intuition.” PoincarĂ© emphasized the term readymade (and its French equivalent, tout fait) by placing the words in prominent italics. “Discovery,” he wrote, “is discernment, selection.” In other words, the intuitive ability to discriminate order within random facts is needed to enable hidden laws to emerge unconsciously from otherwise unfruitful patterns.
Duchamp first used the term readymade (and tout fait) in 1915 and 1916. But he appropriated much more than that single term from PoincarĂ©. In fact, I would maintain that most of Duchamp’s oeuvre, including The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915-1923) and the readymades, represents a complex and quite conscious attempt to break from conventions of “retinal” art and to represent instead what PoincarĂ© regarded as his discovery of the universal, unconscious mechanism of human creativity-a mechanism that could generate “mental beauty” as a new artistic convention.
Duchamp was knowledgeable about non-Euclidean geometries, perspective and topology, including PoincarĂ©’s work, as such scholars as Craig Adcock of the University of Iowa and Linda D. Henderson of the University of Texas at Austin have pointed out. Duchamp mentions PoincarĂ© directly in his notes. On two occasions Duchamp speaks of black coffee as real, in contrast with the tautologies of internal mental manipulation: “everything is tautology, except black coffee.” PoincarĂ© similarly states, “Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.”
Duchamp stated clearly that it did not matter who made his readymades; the important thing was that he, Duchamp, “chose” them (emphasis in the original). Duchamp probably began to represent the “automatic machine motion” of PoincarĂ©’s “subliminal ego” in 1911 with his painting Coffee Mill. Like the subject of the painting, no matter how you crank a PoincarĂ© machine, reality and invention begin and end in black coffee-that is, in material inputs subject to the brain’s tautological manipulations. By the time Duchamp began to choose his readymades, he was inserting himself into the machine and appropriating society’s unconscious production to do the work-hence readymade. Then he could select the objects he would display-not with calculational rules but with his own conscious mind and unconscious “special intuition.”
In the light of PoincarĂ©’s theory of creativity, one can see that Duchamp’s mock art not only combined within it mock mathematics but also included mock discovery. The readymades were not just unexpected individual art objects; they were parts of an experimental game re-enacting the larger and more general creative process. Without the concept of what I call the PoincarĂ©/Duchamp creativity machine, one experiences the readymades retinally, as end products, as punch lines without jokes. But one can now see how Duchamp could assert that the readymades were not “trivial,” but instead represented “a higher degree of intellectuality.”
PoincarĂ© describes his “sudden illumination”: “a host of ideas kept surging in my head; I could almost feel them jostling one another, until two of them coalesced. . . to form a stable combination.” The “unconscious work” was like “gaseous molecules . . . set in motion,” whose collisions “made them produce new combinations.” Those “fruitful” combinations of discovery “appear” to be the result of “preliminary sifting,” in which the “irrational” and “unruly” intuition “plays the part of the delicate sieve.”
Duchamp’s own creative experiments reflect his assimilation of PoincarĂ©’s mechanical process (and terminology!) when Duchamp, for instance, paints by “gaslight” or includes “illuminating gas” in Large Glass. And sifting, too, plays a significant role in Large Glass, according to Duchamp’s notes: in that enigmatic work, “illuminating gas” is “stretched” and undergoes “successive passing through the sieves.” One can read Duchamp’s sifting and molding of illuminating gas as being analogous to PoincarĂ©’s sifting of gaseous molecules; the “fruitful combinations” of molecules turn out to represent ideas that create sudden illumination.
Duchamp frequently emphasized coffee when hinting about the existence of the PoincarĂ©/Duchamp machine. He gave Coffee Mill to his brother as a wedding present, saying, “every kitchen needs a coffee grinder, so here is one from me.” The only present Duchamp said he liked from his own wedding was a coffee machine. In a 1945 essay, Harriet and Sidney Janis (Duchamp’s dealers) write that “Duchamp regards The Coffee Grinder [Coffee Mill] as the key picture to his complete work.” At the 1938 Surrealist Exhibit in Paris Duchamp transformed coffee into “gaseous illumination” and spoke of “an amusing detail, the smell of coffee: In a corner, we had an electric plate on which coffee beans were roasting. It gave the whole room a marvelous smell; it was part of the exhibition.”
The idea of the PoincarĂ©/Duchamp machine enables that “detail” to be understood as part of a coherent whole-rather than as random nonsense-the very experience that PoincarĂ© described as “mental beauty” arising from the discovery of hidden laws.
These ideas also point to the resolution of several contradictions in Duchamp’s work, which have been highlighted by the art historian William Camfield of Rice University in Houston, Texas. Camfield mentions Duchamp’s puzzling statement that the readymades were “made . . . without any object in view, with no intention other than unloading ideas.” The viewer’s reaction, “What could this mean?” moves to “I get it,” when one grasps the process of the PoincarĂ©/Duchamp machine. No “object” would be “in view” when readymades are created, because they are formed in society’s unconscious and are then “unloaded” as ideas into Duchamp’s conscious mind, which he then “chooses.” Large Glass is Duchamp’s creativity machine, whereas the readymades “are completely different” from it; the readymades are the end products of that machine.
One can also comprehend why Duchamp wanted to set up an exhibit of Large Glass and two readymades together. As Duchamp had explained, “readymade talk” is happening within Large Glass. Moreover, when pressed to explain more about the relation between a readymade typewriter cover and Large Glass, Duchamp states, with double meaning, “Oh, it is removed from its machine.” Large Glass exposes the workings of the “discovery” machine, and, again, the readymades are the manufactured products of this creative “mechanism”-a fact that seems simple only in retrospect.
The Coffee Mill machine differs from the Large Glass machine in that Coffee Mill stresses the rational, cranking work of the mental apparatus, whereas Large Glass focuses on the machine’s “irrational” and “undisciplined” combinations (“gaseous molecules”). Those latter must be sifted before the “innumerable,” unfruitful “ideas” can be separated from the ones that illuminate.
Although Duchamp was intrigued by many aspects of mathematics, there is clear testimony that he read and particularly admired PoincarĂ©’s work. François Le Lionnais, a scientist and fellow chess playing friend of Duchamp’s from 1918 until Duchamp’s death in 1968, testified to his frustration in not being able to move Duchamp’s strong and continued interest in science beyond “the philosophical musings of a great mathematician [PoincarĂ©],” which had “influenced him [Duchamp] a lot.” Le Lionnais continued: “Until the end of his life he was stuck at Henri PoincarĂ©.”
So why be surprised that Duchamp appropriated PoincarĂ©’s italicized word readymade to describe a set of his artistic “moves” and then based so much of his life’s work on PoincarĂ©’s theory of creativity? Indeed, it strains the bonds of conceivable coincidence to think that both PoincarĂ© and Duchamp could have used, entirely independently, the word readymade and the themes of coffee drinking, tautologies, sieves, gaseous illumination and the importance of both rest and intuitive selection to describe the creative process.
Coffee anyone?
Rhonda Roland Shearer
Rhonda Roland Shearer is an artist and writer living in New York City. Her book, The Flatland Hypothesis: A New Look at Revolutions in Art and Science, will be published by Copernicus in the fall.
